Disposable sheet products such as paper towels, toilet tissue, and wet wipes have many applications. They may be used with small children and infants when changing diapers, they may be used for house hold cleaning tasks, they may be used for cleaning hands, they may be used as a bath tissue, they may be used as by a caregiver to clean a disabled or incontinent adult, or they may be used in and for a whole host of other applications. Typically, these sheet products have been provided as a stack of separate sheets or as a roll of perforated sheets wound on a solid or hollow core.
Wet wipes have been traditionally been made in processes in which larger webs of wipes are initially made, and then these larger webs are converted into smaller rolls or sheets that can be placed in a dispenser. Embodiments of dispensers are described in application Ser. Nos. 09/565,227 and 09/545,995; in application Ser. Nos. 09/659,307; 09/659,295; 09/660,049; 09/659,311; 09/660,040; 09/659,283; 09/659,284; 09/659,306, filed Sep. 12, 2000; in application Ser. No. 09/748,618, filed Dec. 22, 2000; in application Ser. No. 09/841,323, filed Apr. 24, 2001; in application Ser. No. 09/844,731, filed Apr. 27, 2001; and in application Ser. No. 09/849,935, filed May 4, 2001, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Wet wipes can be any wipe, towel, tissue or sheet like product including natural fibers, synthetic fibers, synthetic material and combinations thereof, that is wet or moist. Examples of wet wipes are disclosed in application Ser. No. 09/564,449; 09/564,213; 09/565,125; 09/564,837; 09/564,939; 09/564,531; 09/564,268; 09/564,424; 09/564,780; 09/564,212; 09/565,623 all filed May 4, 2000; in application Ser. No. 09/223,999, filed Dec. 31, 1998; and in application Ser. No. 09/900,698, filed Jul. 6, 2001, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
For sheet products which are provided in roll form, it may be desirable for the roll to be coreless, such that the maximum number of sheets is provided for a given product size. The manufacture of coreless rolls, however, is typically more difficult than the manufacture of cored rolls. The process of winding a cored roll begins with the attachment of a leading edge of a sheet of material to a core, followed by winding the material around the core. The process of winding a coreless roll, however, must be done without the benefit of a pre-formed core around which to wind the sheet. The formation of a roll from a sheet which is already wet is even more difficult, since the surface of a wet sheet tends to have a much lower coefficient of friction than the surface of a dry sheet, reducing the ability to handle the sheet.
There is a need for improved methods for making wet wipes, particularly for making rolls of wet wipes. Typically, wet wipes are manufactured as a roll of dry sheets and are then soaked in a wetting solution. Among other disadvantages, this method can lead to undesirable variations in the properties and performance of the wipes. It is desirable to manufacture wet wipes such that the wetting solution and its ingredients are uniformly distributed throughout the roll. It is also desirable to manufacture coreless rolls of wet wipes, which can be more conveniently packaged and sold.